Qantas announces “Massive Release of Reward Seats” for 2022

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We’ve already seen evidence of Qantas chomping at the bit to get flyers traveling internationally again when it brought forward the resumption of two key routes last week, and now the airline has shown more evidence of wanting to get people back in the air by announcing that it has released more award seats than ever before for travel in 2022.

Qantas’ biggest-ever award release

Qantas has said that to celebrate the reopening of Australia’s borders next month, it has made “the largest single release of additional Classic Flight Reward seats” in its history across its international and domestic network.

The airline has said that Frequent Flyers will have access to “up to 50% more reward seats” on Qantas international, trans-Tasman and popular domestic routes until the end of 2022 and as these award seats were set to be added to the airline’s systems at 07:00 AEDT on Tuesday 19 October, they should be bookable right now.

More “Points Planes” on the way

Qantas is also getting set to launch more Points Planes – where every seat in every cabin on a flight is available to book as a reward seat – as more states and territories ease domestic and international travel restrictions. While the airline’s press release doesn’t go on to mention when these “points planes” will fly, Points Hack has reported that the first 7 days of Qantas’ flights between Sydney and London and the first 7 days of Qantas’ flights between Sydney and Los Angeles will see every seat in every cabin available as a Classic Flight Reward.

American Airlines isn’t showing Business Class saver awards for Qantas

As soon as I heard that Qantas was dumping award space onto the market, the optimist in me hoped that this would mean that American Airlines would have some 80k one-way LA-Sydney Business Class awards available for the second half of 2022 (by which time, hopefully, Australia will be open to visitors) and my hopes were raised when American’s award calendars showed this availability for July and September 2022:

Upon further investigation, however, it turned out that all of those awards were for travel with Fiji Airways via Nadi.

As it happens, Fiji Airways A350 Business Class looks very nice and would probably be a great way to get from LA to Sydney…but that wasn’t what I was looking for.

I managed to find two dates in December where Qantas Business Class awards are bookable for travel between Los Angeles and Sydney but they were for travel via Brisbane and Melbourne (which struck me as strange because I wasn’t aware that Qantas had announced the restart of those routes)…

…and they’re not going to be of much use to most readers of this blog as it’s highly unlikely that Australia will open up to international visitors before next year.

Bottom Line

Qantas has announced that it has made the largest single release of additional Classic Flight Reward seats in its history and that the award seats are available to be booked right now.

What’s probably going to be of most interest to readers of this blog is the availability of Qantas Business Class seats through American Airlines at the saver level but I’m sorry to report that at the time of writing, I can’t see such awards for travel in 2022. It’s possible that the American Airlines systems haven’t caught up with Qantas’ release just yet and that some saver awards will appear in the coming hours or days so it may be worth checking AA.com periodically over the next few days to see if anything shows up.